1. Exclusivity: As social media gets crowded and everybody is sort of jumping into it, adding friends, sending messages, participating. However, this excitement would be short lived. Compare this with an analogy of email particularly when we started using it in the beginning. We were thrilled to open an account and started telling our friends about it and how we would be glad to hear from them. Slowly,we started getting unwanted mails and it dawned upon us that a lot of it is spam and unwanted emails. Having learnt the hard way, we are now very careful to disclose our email id or subscribe to any information. Social networks would meet the same fate soon since people would be uncomfortable with so many requests coming and that would result in a lot of noise. As a result, we would want to keep our networks exclusive, filled with people who we know, whom we want to share information and those whom we want to receive information from.
2. Privacy: Privacy issues have been common for Facebook, Google and many of the prominent social media channels. But for a user like us, it would be naive to ignore the seriousness of the issues that we could need to face. Locational privacy is something that could translate an online thing into an offline matter. Its one thing to share which movie you saw yesterday or which ice cream you like and another thing to put up on your status update where you are going for a vacation. That opens up a whole range of possibilities for burglary or theft. In fact, to highlight the seriousness of this issue, Please Rob Me, a mash up between Foursquare and Twitter aggregated location content from these sites and put them up PLR. This is of course just a tip of the iceberg as we could run into problems by sharing information.
3. Social TV: Whether TV would replace the PC or vice-versa is a question everyone seems to be asking. None, according to me. However, we would soon witness the era of Social TV wherein the internet is made interactive on TV. Google TV is a step in this direction. This would also usher in an era of T-Commerce wherein people would, for example would want to check out the attire worn by a TV star and where has he purchased from, the reviews of that particular store, how many of his friends have bought from it, what do they have to say, so on and so forth. Already, there is simultaneous consumption happening between TV and social media wherein people are texting while watching their favourite TV soap and exchanging comments.
4. Pattern recognition devices: Imagine a device that gives you every information that you need to have if you just scan an image of your desired product. Or more interestingly, if you scan a good looking face in a pub, you could have a social profile popping up and you would be updated on what are the likes, dislikes of your object of desire. You could also know whether she is single or into a relationship so that you are informed whether to make that first move or not! You could also use this device into say, a retail store and get a lot of information about the product you wish to buy, what people are saying about it, its use etc.
